The impacts of climate change are being felt across the country, with wildfire seasons getting longer and more severe and flooding occurring more frequently. Colorado has experienced significant extreme weather events in the last ten years and, consequently, has begun a statewide effort to incorporate resilience into short- and long-term planning across state and local governments. As cities and counties undergo resilience planning processes, today’s students (tomorrow’s leaders) are often unaware of these efforts and are left out of the planning process. The HEART Force curriculum empowers students with the knowledge needed to participate (and lead) the resilience conversation in their own community, with place-based hazard education that includes a scenario-based role-play game and design thinking to create resilience strategies in their community. The curricular unit culminates with a resilience expo, where students engage with community members as resilience experts and share their ideas. HEART is a novel approach in that it uses several current instructional strategies (place-based learning, project-based learning, gamification, and design thinking) to empower students to engage with their community. If students want to implement their resilience projects that arise from the curriculum, mini-grants are available to fund projects. The HEART program is currently in its second year of piloting in rural and urban Colorado schools. We will present preliminary evaluation findings and share curriculum and program design strategies.

Rural, Indigenous, and Latinx communities in the Southwest region of the U.S. share present and future concerns about drought and water availability as these communities face low and inconsistent precipitation. Using a collaborative process, We are Water has designed informal STEM programs and a traveling exhibit for tribal and rural libraries to create opportunities for individuals and families to engage in conversations about their personal and community connections to water. The decision to use a collaborative design process sought to respect and honor the diversity of voices in these communities by enabling them to express their experiences with water in their own words and see their perspectives incorporated in the ensuing programs and exhibit. As an important Drst step, the project conducted a needs assessment, which invited communities to share their perspectives and stories through surveys and interviews. As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded our project team adjusted its approach to ensure the voices of those hardest hit by the pandemic, Indigenous and Latinx communities, were heard. Instead of in-person relationship building as initially planned, the project team pivoted toward a snowball approach to collect one-on-one phone interviews. Findings from surveys and community interviews showed water conservation, water access, water availability, and water quality were common priorities. This project shows how a collaborative process paired with evaluation can be used as tools for community participation for informed decision making in the design of informal educational experiences.

Rural communities in Colorado face different challenges than urban areas when responding to the impacts of climate change. While these communities may not have access to the financial resources and planning infrastructure that large cities do, close community ties and an entrepreneurial can-do attitude give these communities an advantage to create opportunities for meaningful classroom community engagement. HEART Force is a unique program for secondary students in rural Colorado formal learning settings that educates and empowers students to respond to climate change impacts in the face of increasing likelihood and severity of environmental hazards such as wildfires, floods and drought. The program supports youth partnership with community leaders and experts to build resilience through a three-pronged approach using a curriculum designed to support NGSS. Students begin the unit by learning about the science of environmental hazards and how these hazards will be affected by climate change through analysis of local data. Next, students learn how to manage and respond to hazards in their community in a scenario-based role-play game. The unit culminates in a community resilience expo, giving students the opportunity to address impacts from environmental hazards by developing, presenting, and implementing strategies to increase community resilience. We will share the program design, lessons learned from teacher professional development and support, and preliminary research findings on the program impacts on students and teachers.

Environmental hazards such as wildfire, flood, and drought impact communities throughout Colorado. As climate change ramps up, these environmental hazards are increasing in frequency and severity. These hazards and their impacts provide an excellent access point for students to explore earth science concepts and community well being. The Hazard Education Awareness and Resilience Task Force (HEART Force) is a program for secondary classrooms in rural Colorado designed to help teachers and students move beyond classroom instruction and empower them to lead local efforts to increase resilience to environmental hazards. Colorado has recently adapted and adopted NGSS which provide opportunities for students to engage in real world learning through exploring locally relevant phenomena, yet many classroom teachers are challenged to transition to a new style of teaching driven by student inquiry. With this transition, teachers are being asked to give up some control of the learning process and become facilitators rather than directors of learning. In order to successfully facilitate authentic student engagement, a network of community partners is essential to support students, as well as a supportive school administration and a high level of teacher comfort with risk and uncertainty. The HEART Force program is in the third year of implementation; here we share lessons learned and challenges in supporting teachers in this transition to student-led and community-based learning using resilience education.

Communities across the Southwestern US are increasingly experiencing major disruptions from a changing climate and natural hazards, such as fire, flood, and drought. With this rise in hazardous events, there is a pressing need to support local education and community resilience efforts around climate change impacts. Teaching climate change can be challenging for educators, given the scientific complexity and the need to disentangle political dimensions surrounding the topic. Climate change and environmental hazards are tangible when their impacts are observed close to home. Grounding science learning in personal experiences provides an entry point for learners to the topic and makes learning relevant. In our experience, place-based learning has proven to be a powerful and transformative experience that unites learners through a shared place. Here we present results from three place-based educational programs that serve rural and tribal communities in the Southwestern US and highlight the common findings across these programs around changes in student beliefs and levels of transformation: 1) an after-school program in which students develop a short film about ways in which climate change impacts their community. The storytelling component of film making allows for culturally-sensitive engagement; 2) an in-class instructional unit focused on increasing community resilience in which students learn about local natural hazards through engaging with authentic data, scenario-based role play games and the development of their own community resilience strategy that students present to local community leaders; and 3) a library-based informal science learning program in the southwestern US where communities engage around water as a scarce and valuable resource and share their common stories around the relevance of water. All three programs share a deep grounding in shared place and culture and offer examples of effective engagement with rural communities.

Mentorship experience can be transformational for college and graduate students as they learn how to talk about their science field, articulate their work, learn how to listen, and step away from the focus on their own work. The Lens on Climate Change (LOCC) program engaged secondary students in place-based, environmental science in an informal learning environment. Small groups of students worked together, with the guidance of graduate student science and community college film mentors, to produce a film about climate change, as they perceived it to be relevant to their local communities. The majority of student participants came from historically underserved communities, and the program aimed to provide students with opportunities to engage with science and technology in ways that differ from opportunities available in traditional schooling. The graduate student science mentors and community college film mentors played a critical role in supporting students in their exploration of the topic and learning about local climate change. This presentation explores the impacts on mentors and how the LOCC program influenced their experiences and interests in science education and outreach. Using a qualitative case study approach we examine mentor responses to questions about their mentorship experiences. These responses were collected before and after their experiences in the program, as well as through follow up interviews after the program had ended. Mentors fell into several categories based on how the LOCC program influenced them. Some mentors experienced a transformational impact, where the LOCC program played an influential role in their future career goals. Others felt the program helped them cement their career interests and plans. Several mentors did not experience as much impact on their career trajectory. We examine these relationships in the context of the project to consider how their experiences prior to and through LOCC may have influenced these outcomes.